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# London Grip New Poetry – Spring 2013

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This issue of London Grip features new poems by:

*Peter Phillips *F.M.Brown *Paul Richards *Frankie McMillan *Clare Crossman
*Teoti Jardine *Ian C Smith *Rosemary Norman *Stephen Bone *Rosie Sandler
*Ruth Valentine *Bruce Christianson *Michael Glover *Derek Adams *Julia Bell
*Jennifer Martin *Michael W Thomas *William Oxley *Sue Wootton
*Siobhan Harvey *Emily Strauss *Geoffrey Heptonstall

Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors

A printer-friendly version of London Grip New Poetry can be obtained at LG New Poetry Spring 2013

Please send submissions for the future issues to poetry@londongrip.co.uk, enclosing no more than three poems and including a brief, 2-3 line, biography

Patrick Heron – Red Garden painting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Heron

Editor’s Introduction

While I was assembling this issue of London Grip New Poetry, Tony Harrison’s angry poem V was performed on Radio 4 – its first broadcast since Channel 4 screened it in 1987. On that occasion it provoked howls of protest from those who counted the f***s and c***s and discounted its meaning. Harrison’s poem responds fiercely to the disfiguring of his parents’ grave by spray-painted graffiti and it tackles not only his personal sense of outrage but also the bigger societal questions of disaffection and disillusion which fuel such vandalism. It is very hard to write with such passion (and undeleted expletives) and yet to stay sufficiently in control to make good poetry. Hence it is unsurprising that the attempt seems rarely to be made. Of course I have read and heard poets engaging effectively with issues like global justice or the assumptions of western capitalism. Often however these poets come from less “comfortable” countries than ours; and, alongside them, it has sometimes struck me that poets from “the west” seem less inclined to apply their craft to such big themes.

This issue of LGNP begins with poems about poetry and ends with a poem about art while the poems in between deal with aging, death, landscape and love (probably unrequited); and I believe such themes would predominate in most British poetry magazines. This is not, however, a call for more “political” submissions to London Grip: I only want poets to send me the poems they want to write. But – while V is still fresh in my mind – I am now asking myself whether I subtly compartmentalize my own poetry by denying it access to the issues that exercise me most strongly in the everyday life I live in prose.

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs

http://mikeb-b.blogspot.com/

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Peter Phillips : The Editor Of Vanquished

    Sybil, thank you for recommending
    my sonnet for the Natasha Cambridge prize.

    How could we not? It was masterful.

    Was it? I did work on it quite a lot,
    for almost a day.

    How did you think of the idea –
    fusing those images, so evocative of... of...

    Everything sort of popped out,
    like having a baby.

    Oh, you’re such a natural poet.
    I mean that in the widest sense
    so earth-grounded, you deserve to win.

    It would be nice.

    You might turn out to be our own Jenny Joseph.
    We’d love to make you famous.

    The money would come in handy.

    There’s no money, the trustees award
    a hamper from Harrods –
    the real prize is winning.

    Of course, it would be the greatest
    honour, a hamper sounds scrumptious.
    Could they include some truffles
    and smoked salmon? Hmm, perhaps
    I should have spent another day on it.

Peter Phillips is a London poet. His fifth collection Oscar and I: Confessions of a minor poet (Ward Wood Publishing) will be published in Spring 2013. It charts the ups and downs of the fictional poet, George Meadows.

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F.M. Brown : Gnarling

    We were studying a poem last night
    and there was some talk
    over whether 'gnarled' was a verb
    (there was considerable doubt)
    when I heard someone say
    it sounds a painful process - gnarling.

    There was further discussion
    about whether there was such a word as gnarling.
    There certainly is the word pain
    it definitely does proceed
    and we all pass through the process.
    You can see when you look
    at one of those really ancient trees
    which remind you of old men
    that gnarling would be long and difficult.

    You can see it too
    when you look at one of the old men
    that the trees remind you of.
    I wonder when they began gnarling
    and when they first knew it.
    When did their knuckles first begin to knot?

    But do you know something?
    I'm gnarling now.
    And so are you.

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F.M. Brown : William Carlos pushing meets Vincent pulling

    If I must not paint
    a wheelbarrow red, may I
    look at a blue cart?

F.M. Brown began writing poems after coming south from Yorkshire. Some of them have appeared in Interpreter’s House, Other Poetry and London Grip

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Paul Richards : Moving

    At Bethnal Green overground
    Three men
    Get off
    And march in single file
    As  if hooked in line by a steel wire
    Towards the exit bunker.

    The leader,
    Torso tilted forwards
    Eyes straight ahead
    Tall, rangy
    Denim blue shirt
    White trainers,
    Magisterial Balkan stride
    Carries under his left arm
    A stainless steel sink

    The middle guy
    Could be the leader’s brother
    Same blue shirt
    Same white trainers
    Wolverine
    Hungry for
    The beckoning streets
    Manhandles along
    A sweating black cross
    Between a tea chest and a suitcase
    Straining with the detritus of half a rooming house

    Making up the rear
    A man of paler hue
    Black v-neck shirt
    With bristling handlebar moustache
    The spitting image of a talking head
    From my favourite documentary
    About the SAS
    His eyes
    The polar opposite of asleep
    Murderously intent on Saturday glory
    Wheels along
    An industrial luggage trolley
    Bearing a mammoth green case
    Bursting with what can only be hoped
    Is the last of it

Paul Richards reached his half-century this year, and – apart from writing poetry (and playing the piano) – runs his own computer support business. Although very much a North London homeboy he now finds himself residing in South-West London and is loving it, particularly the green and posh bits. His first “proper” poem, written at the age of 9, was a rendition of the nativity in Tim Rice style pop lyrics.

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Frankie McMillan: Roof Doctor and Co.

    I found two men on my roof
    one had eyes the colour of the sea

    they were looking for a leak
    that had so far fooled the neighbourhood

    the leak was responsible for a chimney
    caving in, white mould forming

    on the inside of the sky, they hoped
    to surprise a nail or two which

    had somehow escaped detection
    they hoped  to record

    the time between when rain
    fell on the tin roof

    to when a spreading stain
    the shape of Africa appeared

    theirs was a constabulary approach
    they understood the wily ways of water

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Frankie McMillan: On the Titanic even the dogs were glamorous

    The French bulldog has a title
    the steerage can’t pronounce

    Gamon de Pycombe

    He strains to hear
    a simple command

    amongst the deafening boom
    something easy like heel or come

    Frou Frou, left in the cabin
    tries to stop her owner leaving

    grips the hem of her frock
    until the seam tears

    as lifeboat three is lowered

    a sailor performs hand signals
    to stitch up the dark

Frankie McMillan is a short story writer and poet from New Zealand. She is the author of The Bag Lady’s Picnic and other stories and a poetry collection, Dressing for the Cannibals. Recent poetry has appeared in Turbine, Sport, Jaam, Snorkel, Trout, The Cincinnati Review and Shenandoah.

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Clare Crossman : Poem for the Night

    When I can’t sleep, I get up and listen to the night.
    Outside, the plum trees clump like black umbrellas,
    the ash tree is a spear, a goods train arrows past.
    The sky above the neon lights is lost to orange shadow.
    The house switched off and shut, stars comma
    above the ink -spilled lawn.
                                                      A few streets away,
    there is a lamp; someone else blurted out of sleep,
    the day behind them stopped, tomorrow getting closer.
    As the dawn comes in, a solitary plane turns west,
    headlights catch the pond, the world returns enough light
    to see by. Rooms are inscribed with breathing, cars pull
    into the traffic.
                                Being awake is better than not dreaming,
    anything can be imagined in the golden square of the door,
    everything begins somewhere in the dark.

Clare Crossman won the Redbeck Prize in 1996. Recently she wrote and performed Fen Song A Ballad of the Fen with two musicians. A collection of her poems The Shape of Us was published by Shoestring Press 2010. She was recently was a prizewinner in the Second Light Competition 2012 and lives near Cambridge.

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Teoti Jardine : Sunday Afternoon In Invercargill

    I’m living in the house where the Queen
    came for afternoon tea, in 1954.
    Earlier that same day I had waved to her.
    I was ten years old, and I’m sure she looked
    right into my eyes and smiled.

    Today the Opera on Sunday is ‘Die Walkure’,
    broadcast directly from the Michael Fowler.
    I move the radio to the front room, open the windows,
    and sit on the verandah listening in the sun,
    circling on Wagner’s updraft.

    Tui are crackling in the trees
     and the pale blue sky speaks of frost tonight.
    My dog Amie is playing with a soccer ball on the lawn.

    The man who built the house in 1918
    is standing next to me, he enjoys  the opera too,
    and he smiles as he surveys his wool scouring plant.

Teoti Jardine, was born in Queenstown New Zealand, of Maori, Irish and Scottish descent . His Maori tribal affiliations are Waitaha, Kati Mamoe and Kai Tahu. He has been writing poetry off and on most of his life. His poems have appeared in previous issues of London Grip New Poetry and also in Te Panui Runaka, the Burwood Hospital News Letter and the Christchurch Press Poetry section.

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Ian C Smith : He wishes

    Urging his sons to see where he once lived
    not far from their student lodgings
    he knows they lack interest, knows
    this interest waits far in their future.

    Gentle rain misty as soft kisses,
    his boys talking over each other,
    tagging along, oblivious, ignoring him
    where his old street straddles the railway.

    But for the sooty bricks’ graffiti
    he could step through earlier rain;
    a taxi stops by this kerb, a girl he knows
    winds the window down to flirt.

    He feels like the last Arctic wolf in winter,
    gives up on describing his youth
    as a squall insists on here and now,
    whipping them back to the car.

    Windscreen foggy, he thinks of the young Yeats
    spreading his dreams under his love’s feet,
    tenderly asking her to tread softly
    as they U-turn and swish away.

Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in Axon:Creative Explorations,The Best Australian Poetry,Chiron Review, Island, Southerly,& Westerly. His fifth book is Contains Language, Ginninderra Press (Adelaide). He lives in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, Australia.

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Rosemary Norman: Smoker

     Smoke goes up
           in a loose diagonal
                  of greys. His chair

    is high backed -
           nothing to see
                  of him except

    the skies he
           looks out at till
                  he strolls, smoke

    over one shoulder,
           into their dazzle
                  where a branch

    at head height
           and a particular
                  leaf distract him.

    Then he strolls
           back to inhabit
                  smoke and ash.

Rosemary Norman’s second collection Italics was published by Shoestring Press in Autumn 2010. Her work with video artist Stuart Pound is at www.stuartpound.info

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Stephen Bone : Ash

     In extreme age
    a girl would come
    to cut his hair-
    wisps that grew
    like spun sugar
    on a head otherwise
    smooth and pink
    as on his birth day.

    A towel around his
    shoulders; her scissors
    flashing like a heliograph
    he would sit by the open fire;

    watch logs bubble resin,
    listen to their spit
    and whine -

    white hair
    falling from him
    like ash.

Stephen Bone’s work has been published in various magazines including Seam, Smiths Knoll, The Interpreter’s House and The Rialto.

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Rosie Sandler : Patient

    Day after day his tell-tale
    face turned to the wall,
    the brown flowers
    blooming on the sheet.

    Day after day
    playing the bars of his chest
    like a xylophone
    while he shrinks
    in the bathwater.

    Day after day slipping
    clothes over this stickman
    whose body still ticks
    – like a bomb in a cartoon,
    counting down the minutes.

    Day after day
    waking to
    his shrivelled-walnut eyes;
    going to sleep in time
    to the squeezebox
    of his lungs.

    He’s leaving me
    with every rib-caged breath
    and day after day
    all I can feel
    is relief.

Rosie Sandler’s poems and short stories have appeared in print and online including the anthology Bugged, and (shortly) The Rialto. Her young adult novel, Rare Sight, can be read at http://www.movellas.com/en/book/read/201211052234423573 and she is currently looking for an agent for her novel for adults, James Fitzpatrick as Himself – a tale of love, poetry and cross-dressing. She blogs at: http://rosiesandler.wordpress.com/

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Ruth Valentine : Impersonations

with thanks to David Harsent for the titles

     i	Death the Locksmith

    So here you are, standing out in the street
    in the dark between the lamp-posts, half-laughing, watching
    the gestures of shadow-puppets on the curtains,
    the white cat on the windowsill looking out

    for nightingales.  It was a great evening.
    you’ve still got that jazzed-up folksong on the brain,
    along with the taste of the South American wine
    and the joke somebody told, but now you’re losing

    the punch-line, out here on your own.  You’re getting cold,
    you could do with a loo, and though you keep on ringing
    no-one comes down to let you in.  Way past
    one a.m., the locksmith happens along
    in his van with the big red phone-numbers.  He slows
    to where you’re sitting hunched on the kerb, and smiles.

    ii:	Death as technical support

    wants the first and third letters, your date of birth,
    your postcode, so he can find you on the system
    and tell you when you’ll next use your Oyster card,
    where you’ll be off to, which shoes you’ll be wearing

    and why.  He won’t, of course.  He’s too discreet,
    enquiring, So, Ruth, what can I help you with?
    (though surely he knows already).  You list:
    the touch-pad, the cursor, all your emails gone
    no doubt to Mars or some thirteenth dimension;

    though you don’t say that, mustn’t give the impression
    you’re deluded, senile, never been online
    before you picked up the phone.  You have to trust him.
    You click on remote access and watch the icons
    vanishing one by one from the blue screen.

    iii: 	Death the Dreamer

    Out in the garden on a sun-lounger
    between the false acacia and silver birch
    you planted soon after you moved into the house
    all those years ago, when the children
    were fair-haired and ran in circles round the pond,

    and you stopped off after work for a game of squash
    then sat with a gin and tonic in just the spot
    where he’s waiting, reading
    Keats, or Shelley on Keats – He has outsoared –
    but looks up as you come down the garden steps,

    one shaking hand on the rail, the other clutching
    your daughter’s arm, afraid that Death might run
    and snatch you up in his sunburnt arms, and swing
    away to his still dark lake through the leaf shadows.

Ruth Valentine’s latest collection is On the Saltmarsh (Smokestack Books). She lives in Tottenham.

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Bruce Christianson : Death in the Family

    death holds the baby
    while her mother adjusts
    the carseat

    at these big reunions
    you don't know everyone
    but death seems familiar

    death is used to babies
    & they can tell
    this one smiles

    & goes cross-eyed
    as death's fingertip
    touches her nose

    her mum takes her back
    death waves bye bye
    for now

Bruce Christianson is a mathematician from Whangarei, New Zealand, who moved to Hertfordshire twenty-five years ago. He and death are currently having a trial separation.

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Michael Glover : Casual People

    Casual people striking apples
    Down from someone’s apple tree…
    Someone gave them sticks to strike with,
    Someone out of love with me.

    Apples, always pendent apples,
    Apples hanging from the tree,
    That is how I always like them,
    Not upon the ground, in heaps.

    Someone gave me a red apple
    From the tree. She’d struck it down,
    A casual person, with an apple,
    Staring at me. I stared down.

    Apples must be pendent apples.
    Apples must not leave the tree.
    If the tree one day should drop them,
    Strike that tree until it bleeds.

Michael Glover is a Sheffield-born, London-based poet, art critic and editor. His last two books are Only So Much (2011) and Headlong into Pennilessness, a memoir of growing up in Sheffield.

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Derek Adams : So Long, My Sweet

    Down by the pier head,
    the light of an oncoming ferry
    stabs through the fog.

    Everything is gun-metal grey, grainy.
    She clutches her handbag automatically.
    Says ‘I still love you’.

    I slap her, hard, explain the plot.
    Soft focus tears reflect
    the flashing lights

    of an arriving squad car.
    The siren still receding in my head
    as I reach out for her.

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Derek Adams : The Road to Les Verrières

February 1871

    Hunger, a new gravity, drags on muscle.
    Instinct and momentum wrench
    one foot after the other from snow
    packed solid by rag shod feet.

    In either direction, blue jackets,
    further than the eye can allow.
    From one day into the next
    the human train passes.

    To stop, to rest, is not an option:
    Prussians, frostbite, wolves, exhaustion,
    crows that circle in a black screech
    against a gunmetal sky; each

    more certain than the lead shot
    flattened against Bourbaki’s skull,
    as he thrashed in his blood
    cursing his pistol and Versailles.

    A returning shadow-like dream
    longer than echoing yesterday,
    to reach the border
    traverse its event horizon,

    hand-over names and epaulets,
    pile sabres and rifles
    in a towering mass of defeat,
    bodies collapsing under its weight

Derek Adams is a professional photographer who writes poetry because he has to! He has published 3 collections of poetry; the most recent unconcerned, but not indifferent is a poetry portrait of the surrealist artist Man Ray. He is currently studying for an M.A. in creative writing at Goldsmiths.

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Julia Bell : Lot’s Wife

after Wislawa Szymborska

    So we left it, burning, escaped, only just,
    as the timbers fell behind us across the threshold.
    You know the sort of scene, you saw it on TV:
    Apocalypse, Armageddon, the kind of thing
    beloved of teenage boys because of all the cool
    explosions and grotesque decapitations
    and because no one you like ever really dies.
    I could feel the heat of it against my back
    all the way up the mountain, a long climb and
    difficult in the dark with the children clinging
    to my ankles, the dead weight of all of our possessions.

    I suppose I looked because I wanted to be amazed
    at how quickly my old life could be turned to ruin,
    to catch my breath, take a sip of water, but he had already run
    on ahead. I was made slow with all that I was carrying
    Perhaps I was frozen, too, by the size of the disaster.
    A whole city burning, turning the sky into a late Monet,
    the blind man’s lurid colours, beautiful in the way that
    transformations have of provoking wonder.
    At first I thought it was the tears that I could taste, or sweat,
    dehydration from all the running, but then my legs began to go.
    Salt is a funny thing: why not stone, or gold, or Malachite?

    So here I am, traveller, watch and learn,
    disaster stalks the unwary at every turn,
    the trick is to keep moving forward while you still can.

Julia Bell is a writer & academic. She works at Birkbeck, teaching on the MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of two novels for Young Adults – Massive and Dirty Work – both published in the UK by Macmillan – and is the editor of the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook which she wrote while teaching at UEA. She is the founder and director of the Writers Hub website and is currently working on several projects including a memoir in verse called Hymnal and a new novel for Young Adults.

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Jennifer Martin: Blind Lions

    Cold day in November, outstretched arms
    barely visible in the fog. We took a walk
    across the bronzed floor of the countryside,
    the flanks of the woodland dark and grainy
    as silent film; red berries startling as sudden blood.

    The walk led us to the manor house –
    grounds open to the public in winter.
    Nobody else was around. We wandered zodiac
    sundials; towers with blue clocks, gold hands;
    stone lions rooted in the purgatory of a roar.
    I removed a glove touch one, the face of it worn
    unrecognisable as the dedications on old graves.
    I touched its dull teeth; eyes rough cavities
    pitted by starving blackbirds.

    We found the dark earth below cedars waiting for bluebells,
    a marble bathtub, a wooden bridge across a stream, statues of Venus
    rising from the ivy. On every corner, a blind lion roaring.
    I recognised it. We’d come
    to the place that looked like the feeling:
    I tried to tell you I loved you, and both of us were silent.

    We looked out at the tiers of hills, dark winter green
    blackening beneath the low mist, the last leaves on the trees
    were lanterns. We talked about the future at its most vague,
    polite as Catholic Edwardians desperate to live passionately,
    but with no idea where to find the clitoris, or how to ask.

Jennifer Martin has previously had poetry published in The Rialto, The Warwick Review, Orbis, Ambit, Poetry Cornwall, South, Obsessed with Pipework and Monkey Kettle.

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Michael W Thomas : Tintagel

    I want to rise in steam
    from the leafy thrust
    of hot public gardens
    and anchor in the skies above Tintagel

    where the postmistress
    and the lading-clerk,
    loveless through years of cargo,
    of letters insulted by boot-heel and rain,
    fall at last in each other’s way.

    I shall be the promenade
    that opens blue
    between her corsage and his gravy stains
    the engine of an evening’s walk
    idling
    the something that aligns her daring toes
    with his better-days leather.

    I shall, a moment on,
    be the pinch-gap
    of thumb and finger
    lifting ill-chosen pie from his breath
    and a lifetime’s disabling catch
    from hers

    so words come
    so a murmur outcrooks his elbow
    so another hinges her resinous fingers
    within it
    just so
    henceforward.

Michael W. Thomas’s poetry and fiction has been published in Europe, the US and Australia, in such magazines as Stand, Other Poetry, Etchings, Irish University Review, the Antioch Review and The London Magazine, for which he also reviews. His latest novel, Pilgrims at the White Horizon, and poetry collection, The Girl from Midfoxfields, will be published in 2013. http://www.michaelwthomas.co.uk/

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William Oxley : View

    From the green undulation
    	that is the Plains of Abraham
    beyond the solid bastion
    	that is the Citadel, you can
    view a distant mountain sunset
    	bloodied as a raw steak
    but far more beautiful than that:
    	an enskyed red lake
    palpitating this and that, this and that
    	in the uplifted heart of Quebec.

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William Oxley : Not Interpreting

    The low sun bends upon the lake
    and rushes stir in the wind:
    fat-syllabled breath of the north
    indicates winter is close behind.

    It’s an austere natural world,
    I find, full of thought –
    all I ever thought of Canada
    is changed: I am being re-taught.

    Country of work and hard play,
    it seems ‘kinda lonely’
    like a landscape forever bathed
    in moonlight is lonely.

    Walking through trees by water
    it is a wilderness of feeling
    I am seeing, I am hearing
    but not, somehow, interpreting.

William Oxley lives in Devon, and in April 2013 is publishing a collection of his Exeter-based poems with photographs by Barry Davidson. Later this year, too, his translations of the Persian poet Hafiz (co-translator Parvin Loloi) will appear; and in 2014 his Collected Poems and New Poems is due from Rockingham Press.

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Sue Wootton : Unspooling

    You think from now on you’ll cast each line farther into the river,
    perhaps as far as the slow pool under the opposite bank where surely
    the granddaddy trout swims in place. You think you’ll dimple the fly

    to the dark water and let it drift at the insistence of the current, that dark
    insistence, its indifference to your appreciation of its insistence.
    But though you think you’ll drop the fly just so, you’ve failed to factor in

    the snags, the weeping willow or the droop-wired fence, and furthermore
    your arm is weak, your aim is poor.  Three days you spend
    at the river, tangles and knots and nothing netted.  So now you think

    you’ll try a new tack,  string and a hot-glue gun to make a diamond
    kite from newsprint on a balsa frame; and over lunch you read
    your sky-bound horoscope which predicts difficulties in all spheres

    due to the planets pointing directly at you, so you crack
    the calcified head of an egg and eat soldiers spread
    with marmite and dipped in yolk (alas, you think, poor Yorick)

    and fill in the Code Cracker while a storm wind buffets
    the house until the headlines on the kite get jumpy, at which point
    you think you’ll don a woolly hat and wrap up warm and let the wind

    do the unwinding and all you’ll have to do is brace your feet
    into the ground and hold the stick round which you’ve wound
    a string to touch the moon, and this you do: full of wound-up

    Yet (let’s face it) wounded hope, you liberate your kite
    into the gull-slip sky – it’s taken up,  it’s flying! Then
    it’s not

    and you wonder if unspooling is, will ever be, your forte,
    a question you will never answer since it never ends, this asking,
    this tasking, this casting your line on gale and water

    this dropping it or lifting it, this suffering it
    to collect snagweed, downdraft, to accumulate
    its rat-nest knots and fractures, to accept the catch of absence

    to reel              reel                  reel

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Sue Wootton : Cross

    This is not the ABC of destiny, nor
    is it the 1,2,3 of fate. This is neither

    sequence nor formula. Not the The.
    It’s fractional. It’s where to spell

    ordinary. It’s a trail of crumbs
    on the bench that shows you home.

    It’s the fridge, the sink, the dirty
    laundry. The cutlery drawer, the bed:

    the spoons. This is where the lovers
    actually live. Things repeat and this is

    neither formula nor sequence. There is
    an ellipsis of stepping stones

    for crossing a misted lake. Or beads
    strung on an abacus none of us can see.

    Who can tell? Only embark. Only
    count on it.  It adds up somehow.

New Zealander Sue Wootton is the author of three collections of poetry, an illustrated children’s book, and the short story collection The Happiest Music on Earth (Rosa Mira Books 2012) Further information is available on her website suewootton.co.nz

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Siobhan Harvey : The Gifted Ideologist is Placed in a Naughty Circle

    On day one, he sits in a chiton of white tape
    reading Republic. You’re naughty, his new teacher snaps.
    He challenges with boys who swear and a girl who steals
    lollies from teacher’s desk. Such disrespect, teacher says.

    On day two, the gifted ideologist returns to his prison.
    Within its houppelande of white tape, he reads The Prince.
    He reflects upon just resistance, weltpolitik,
    and the liberation of the oppressed.

    On day three, in white-taped ruff, he’s locked indoors
    at break, endures heavy heat and contemplates Leviathan.
    Its fiery rhetoric dreams him a new world
    of social contracts and equitable rule.

    At day’s close, the gifted ideologist rises, vanishes.
    Hey presto! The naughty circle explodes like a star.
    His wonder is so great, he forget politics is illusion.

    Night comes. A black hole chasms the classroom.
    At the edges, an inferno devours floors, desks, walls,
    pencils, books, pictures, computers, leaving nothing
    but the suggestion of school – the child, the idea.

Siobhan Harvey is the author of the poetry collection, Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts NZ, 2011) and a book of literary interviews, Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010). She is also editor of Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House NZ, 2009). Her poems have appeared in such magazines as Asheville Poetry Review (US), Evergreen Review (US), Five Poem Journal (Ned), Landfall, Meanjin (Aus),Poetry New Zealand, Structo (UK) and Tuesday Poem (NZ/ US). She is Poetry Editor of Takahe and Coordinator of National Poetry Day (NZ). In 2011, she was runner up in the Landfall Essay Prize (NZ) and Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems (NZ), and nominated for the Pushcart Prize (US). As part of the 25 New Zealand Poets Project, her Poet’s Page was recently launched on The Poetry Archive (UK).

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Emily Strauss : Tabula Rasa

Thales thought everything boiled down to Water, which he seems to have seen as an inherently divine material substance with no agency in nature; his immediate successors posited their own monist principles, including Air, Fire, and the Infinite.

    Their first question: is water the ultimate
    explanation of reality?

    We find water everywhere, rising
    as mist from the sea, falling as
    rain, like the mother-womb
    of all things, a notion without
    a fable, a unifying entity

    or maybe the root substance
    is boundless, deathless air,
    the breath that animates every bird
    and pushes the winter leaves
    into rotten piles, the ultimate
    source of the cosmos we exhale.

    Their second question: are we simply
    a blank slate?

    An emptiness on which air and water
    stream equally, and by their paths
    crossing we create what we see,
    what we know and feel, like tiny
    footprints of new-found lizards
    that appear in the sand without
    explanation in the morning's light.

    Their final question: is the world
    not material but only imagined?

    Presupposed, created within us
    and projected onto the black
    sphere around us until we believe
    in sunsets and spider webs, feel
    their tremulous vibrations deep
    inside and become wise, knowing
    we are not alone, that color follows
    night and we must act accordingly.

Emily Strauss is an American, retired teacher, and life-long writer of poetry. She has around 70 poems in public, online and in anthologies in several countries. She often focuses on my natural world of the American West because she finds it more interesting than many people’s activities.

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Geoffrey Heptonstall : DAYNIGHT

Patrick Heron’s Art

                    Moon (silence)                                         (Thoughts) sleeping
                    and                                                              and
                   (Pale) dawning                                           Words (dreaming)
                    and                                                              and
                    Sun (rising)                                                (Life) waking
                    and                                                              and
                   (Light) moving                                            Colour (changing)
                    and                                                              and
                    Blue (setting)                                            (Time) going

    time dawning and pale words and blue thoughts and moving silence and setting
    moon and waking light and risen colour and dreaming sun and sleeping life

                                                         SUN   MOON
                                                      LIGHT  COLOUR
                                                  WORDS   THOUGHTS
                                                       TIME   LIFE
                                                       BLUE   PALE

Geoffrey Heptonstall’s play Providence was performed at The Britannia, East London in January. He also helped devise a masque, Emperors for Tea, at The Savoy, to raise money for young East Londoners.

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#### 1 Comment

1. jane
   28/03/2013 @ 15:35

   Thankyou. Some wonderful poems and how good to read reviews by Carole Woddis…she’s a terrific reviewer.